Stay True to Your Writing, A Letter to My Younger Self

You write a poem and put in in your drawer. You say all you want to do is write. I understand. Your father says you need to get a career. He says you will work for the rest of your life. Your mother says none of your efforts are wasted.

You go to your attic bedroom, the room he built for you, and listen to The Beatles White Album. Everything’s changing. The carpet and walls are white like the record jacket. Maybe revolutionary. You want to be like them.

But for now you open an algebra book and do an assignment.

The next day you read an essay you wrote where George Harrison’s guitar speaks. A friend comes up to you after Freshman English and says it’s amazing. Accept his thanks. You are a star.

After Math and Science during your senior year, go to creative writing in the afternoon, and let it cast a spell.

Go to the college your father chose for you. Change your majors three times, as you must, and find out who you are. You will write term papers for Sociology and Psychology courses. You love studying the human condition, but always feel there’s something more. Take Creative Writing spring semester of your junior year. Write a short story for an assignment. Take care in creating the beginning, the middle, the ending. You are single but it will about a married man who took a break from his demanding wife.

Your classmates will grade it well but come back to it years later to understand.

Read poems to the friend you made senior year as she sits with you in her intimate nook, the one with red wallpaper. Share hot tea and conversation. She will come to you after you fail your field experience for your Social Work major. She will come to you when you need her most.

Keep your creative spark after college. The jobs you find will never be what you expect, and always find time to write.

Let me tell you, I’ve born more troubles in my life than your young heart could bear.

The jobs I’ve had— they’ve come and gone. I’d become too busy to write at times, but now I am..

I’ve been an aide to social workers in a child welfare agency, a box-cutter, a customer service rep at call centers, and a flagger/traffic control for construction crews. I’ve loved women and lost them. But as time passed, I came back to writing. That’s who I am.

Now that I’ve fallen out of touch with a lady I’ve known, I’m starting to understand the meaning of the story. You’ll find out in time as you suffer for the arts.

You must find someone who shares your passions or let them go. If you sit alone at night, look out the window at the moon and the stars.

The lady from college said that you must live to write, and that’s true. But you must always write.

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